Oh god. Hopefully they’re lighter than the old xserves. We had one still running up until a few years ago when we finally removed it. You could break a toe if it dropped while pulling it out of the rack. People are still selling them on eBay.
I suspect that was the RAID drive bay (ridiculous item). That was a 3-4U monster.
The Xserve, itself, was a 1U unit that was pretty much the same (or lighter than) any other 1U server (we also had HP and Dell servers that were heavy). The weight distribution could be weird.
That stupid drive bay was a proprietary nightmare. The disks cost a fortune.
However, from what I can see, this will be for "internal-use" servers. I don't think they will be selling iron; just services run on the iron.
I don't think it's AI servers for Apple to sell. I think it's just regular x86 Linux servers to power Apple's AI cloud services. It's a commitment to internal investment rather than a product.
They have hiring positions for running a Darwin-based server OS, and their private cloud compute is on Apple Silicon. I doubt it's going to be swaths of x86.
I'm curious what they will look like, given that these are not for anyone else to buy. Maybe Apple made a different form factor/configuration that suits their datacenters better?
